If Not In My Backyard, Then Where?

On July 17 Dorothea Dix will have been dead for one hundred twenty-one years. She died at the age of eighty-five years. For the first half of her life she tried to find meaningful work in the few professions available to women. She worked as a schoolteacher and a governess. She did some writing. She paid a price for traditionalism and in her mid thirties suffered a severe 'breakdown'. She went to England to recover and wound up in the company of some pretty radical thinkers who believed that the government should assume responsibility for the social welfare of its citizens. She also entered into the British 'lunacy reform movement' and returned to her home state of Massachusetts with a focused passion -- the welfare of the indigent mentally ill. She dared to speak out against the incarceration of the mentally ill in prisons where they were often chained to walls and left to recover independent of any type of treatment or attention. She researched this treatment and presented her report to the legislature. She had found that the indigent mentally ill were often chained, left naked, beaten with rods and lashed into certainly not recovery but at least obedience. She changed the laws in Massachusetts to expand the state's mental hospital in Worcester.
Off and running, Ms. Dix expanded her research and documented the treatment of the indigent mentally ill on a national level. She lobbied state legislatures to improve the treatment of the mentally ill and those changes impacted North Carolina and Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
But even then, even Dorothea Dix, knew that permanent reform for the treatment of the mentally ill and certainly for the indigent mentally ill was a Sisyphean undertaking and too emotionally beaten up to continue, she returned to Europe to recover in saner climates.
Again energized, she returned to this country to become the Superintendent of Union Army Nurses. Always at odds with the male doctors, she was eventually fired. She lived out the rest of her life feeling like a complete failure.
Sometimes she worked for free and she never sought the limelight or glory. And she certainly missed out on her retirement benefits. Luckily for her, though, the State of New Jersey remembered and appreciated. She was given a room at the New Jersey State Hospital in Morris Plains and there she died -- in accommodations similar to those available to the indigent mentally ill in New Jersey because of her belief that the mentally ill deserve respect and gentle treatment. She got it that it's no crime to suffer from any illness.
All that she accomplished and tried to accomplish she did in the second half of her life after what might have been called a mid life crisis.
One hundred twenty-one years after the death of this social reformer, the largest psychiatric facility in the country is the Los Angeles County Jail. One hundred twenty-one years after the death of this woman who often worked for nothing, services to the indigent mentally ill are eliminated or reduced so severely as to be available only as token treatment. One hundred twenty-one years after the death of this woman who believed and knew that anyone can become indigent and anyone can become mentally ill, few people want treatment centers in their back yards.
But Dorothea Dix's work did change the way people think and feel about the indigent mentally ill. That's why so many underpaid, never heard of mental health professionals work so hard to help better the lives of people who live on the fringes of society not because that's where they want to live but because that's where society puts them.
And those who don't want them in their backyards are right. The mentally ill do not belong in backyards. They belong in their own homes and they deserve the best medical treatment - both physical and mental -- possible.
But first, of course, we must fight wars and fix toilets in outer space and pay unbelievable salaries to our executives and make sure, definitely, that our oil companies continue to rake in obscene profits.
Social welfare demands social justice.
We need another Dorothea Dix to point that out and to champion without concern for fame or wealth the rights of those among us unable to do so for themselves. In the meantime, it's reassuring and, yes, inspiring to know that she gave it her best shot.